So I guess I’m going to NECC. I’m still up in the air about it, although I was accepted to present in the Open Source Lab. I’ll have to go into debt to go, since there’s no funding help, so it’s a question of whether I should.

Either way, I got this email and I have a bit of an ethical problem with it. I recognize that the publishers want to get their books out there, but this seems sketchy. My inclination is to politely decline, but I wondered if you didn’t have an alternate viewpoint? Is there something I’m missing? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill?

Here’s the email in its entirety, published with explicit permission from the publishing company and the author of the email.

Dear Chris,

I noticed that you are presenting on Moodle at the upcoming NECC in San Antonio.  I am with FTC Publishing and we publish the book Moodle Magic: Make it Happen, by Laurie Korte.  If you are not familiar with this book, it is a great resource for educators looking to begin using Moodle or educators who are looking for tips and tricks for using Moodle in the classroom.  I was wondering if you would be interested in receiving a few of these books to use as giveaways during your session.

We would supply you a copy of the book for your own personal use as well as the giveaways.  We would also include a few coupons and catalogs for attendees of your session that are interested in learning more about the books.

If you are interested in receiving these materials please email me back with the number of people you are expecting to attend your session as well as the address of the location you would like for us to ship the items.

Thanks for your time and I look forward to hearing from you.

I think part of my issue is that I’ve not read the book. If I were a fan of the book to begin with, this would be easy, since it would be a genuine, voluntary endorsement. I haven’t read it, though, so it makes me feel like a bit of a puppet if I were to give these out.

Once before, PbWiki gave me some premium wikis to give out but I was ok with that since I was already a bit of a PbWiki evangelist. I use that software regularly and like it a bunch, so there’s my difference there.

Also, I approached PbWiki. They have a presenter pack (or did, it’s been a few years) that I emailed to get. They did not approach me.

The publisher probably searched for Moodle in the NECC planner and found me. Is that bad? Not necessarily.

I’m just not sure how to respond. What do you think?

Chris

11 Comments »

Got this email today, not sure about this, I feel uneasy. What do you think?

David wrote:
Slide share - Moodle.

We are looking for advice and we are willing to pay you for it. We have a
project where Moodle is the center of focus.

David

And then a second email that said:

Chris - sorry - my bad.

By the way, the MOODLE deal is the beginning of some big projects and I feel we
need a sharp expert who knows the technology. I wouldbe asking you to help us
set the stage for MOODLE based on the certain plug ins we would need. Your
expertise would help us and you would recieve compensation !! Can we connect?

Not sure about all this. I have not looked at the web site in his email address,  pretty sure it will be blocked here at school.

What do you all think?

3 Comments »

I posted this on the Moodle installation problems forum but I want to post it here in case someone finds it by search or otherwise. Here is the post in its entirety…

I am posting this for anyone else who might run into this scenario.

I upgraded from 1.7+ to 1.8.2 and when I went into my courses and turned editing on, it returned a blank page. Needless to say, I freaked out.

I combed the forums and figured out that a lot of folks have this problem due to incompatible blocks or activities. I didn’t think I had any of these installed.

Turns out I did.

It wasn’t one I thought it would be, but when I went into debugging mode it returned an incompatible block.

I deleted it from both activities and the blocks and the site works fine. Maybe this will help someone else.

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I wish OpenAcademic would hurry up.

I say that partly in jest, but partly for real. They are working on solutions that I am really looking forward to trying out. I am not savvy enough to figure out the details of OpenID, but it may be possible to link my Drupal user authentication and Moodle authentication. Obviously I would want Drupal to pull from Moodle, but not vice versa.

I should learn more. Maybe I can figure this out. We’ll see!

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I have been working tirelessly to upload all my students’ info in preparation for a new semester after the upcoming holiday break.

Since we do so much work on our Moodle, and since I receive over one hundred new students each nine weeks, I need a mass upload solution to input user data. Here is how I have achieved it thus far…

(side note, I have yet to upgrade to the latest version of Ooo, which is version 2.1)

1. I have found that OpenOffice Calc works better than MS Excel for this purpose. It seems to be less fussy about beginning zeros. Some of the randomly generated numbers have one or two zeros at the beginning and Excel cuts them off before I can reformat the cell. So using MS Excel, I would have to add the requisite number of zeros to over two hundred records. OpenOffice doesn’t seem to care. Nice.

2. OpenOffice Calc also handles finding and replacing better than MS Excel. Some of the records need to be reformatted to remove certain characters, and OpenOffice Calc handles that with aces. Even if I were able to conquer problem # 1, Excel loses the battle here as well.

3. So once I get all the data in the format that Moodle wants I upload it and watch it go. One note, and this was a hard lesson to learn. As I go to SAVE AS, and select CSV, it asks for delimiters. The field delimiter has to be a comma (,) and the text delimiter has to be blank. By default, the text delimiter is a quotation mark (”) and it must be deleted. I went rounds with this program trying to figure out what the problem was, and it took me a while to figure out a text delimiter was not necessary. On top of that, once I exported as CSV, it defaulted to open as Excel, so I had to make sure I forced an open with Wordpad, since I’m on my PC.

So those lessons have been learned, and I hope they help others.

I really need to find a multiple user CSV uploader to Drupal. This is the simple reason I have not used my Drupal installation this nine weeks, because it has been remarkably time consuming to manually enter over two hundred accounts waiting for the slow connection between submissions, etc. I looked for one of these before and can recall not having any luck, although I am going to once again take up the search for it. Any help here would be appreciated.
Ultimately I won’t know how successful I have been until the kids come in and I can see how many of their usernames and passwords fail. Assuming my error rate is less than ten percent, I can add those kids on the fly. If there are less than twenty students, stretched across six classes, the average is low per class, at least I hope.

Anyway, all my uploading is done for now. It looks good, although when I changed the name of the course in Moodle, some of my boxes went away, including the most important Social Activies block, and I freaked out before I figured out I could just re-add it. So it came back, and now it’s ok.

1 Comment »

Ok so I need some help. Now that I have been working with Moodle for a bit, I have been thinking a lot. Here are my areas of concern and desires for feedback.

If you want to look at it (not much to see) the moodle is here… http://moodle.thinkingaboutteaching.com

It runs as a subdomain of my new blog site.

First some back story. As it stands right now the Moodle is a walled garden. There are no account creation abilities and guests are only allowed access with an enrollment key. I intend this for parents who want to be able to check in. Presumably they could ask the student for login info, but it’s a nice fix for me not to have to look anything up. So there is no outward-facing site. This is part of my problem. We went from blogging, podcasting, and wiki-ing to a walled garden of just us. I am not sure I like that. Moodle has a blog engine built in that can be set to allow the world to read the postings, but I like that Drupal allowed me to show everyone’s posting on the front page and they all funnel down to one sole RSS feed which made for easy keeping-track.

Inside Moodle there is a chat feature. I can see the benefit of this for college students that may be taking a class and need to collaborate from dorm rooms, Starbucks, or parent’s basement. Do my kids need it? Now to be sure, they LOVE it. But is it worth the risk? I looked at all the chat logs from the two days chat was available and I didn’t like the looks of what I saw. There was nothing dirty, so to speak, but the way kids speak to each other these days is a bit harsh. If I permit them to speak to each other in a manner less than respectfully, am I opening myself up to liability? Especially considering no one around me has done this before so there is no precedent. Would I be better off not allowing chat? I would hate that, because that is this site’s biggest draw for my kids, that they can complete work online, take practice quizzes online, and ask for help in real time. Not to mention we are planning a live Skype Videoconference on December 4 and I would love for my kids to be able to chat with the kids in Peru with whom we are going to conference. All the major chat servers are blocked from school, except Google Talk and that of course requires a Google account. Not an issue for me, but imagine all these kids in Peru that I can grant guest access to with an enrollment key, compared with trying to explain how to obtain a Google account…

So is there room for a separate blogging solution? Do I let them chat?

This is harder than I thought.

Truth is, I want to open the Moodle up to the entire world because I think I have created an entirely online Spanish class. I am using Slideshare, and soon will be posting recordings of my mini-lectures so kids can watch. It’s like Spanish in a box! I also want there to be interaction with the outside world, not just each other. I want feedback from people, not just other kids.

What do you think? What do I do??

6 Comments »

So I decided to be brave yesterday. Here’s the backstory first…

A few days ago I decided that it was high time to get kids involved. Nothing finds a loophole in software, or an undesired feature better than a kid with some free time. I have spent weeks pouring over this software trying to figure it out, learn it, master it. Now it was time to unleash the students!

Getting their usernames and passwords uploaded turned into a nightmare. Because the username is a system of numbers that begins with 0’s, Excel kept erasing the 0’s as it would for a number. For example, if the user number is 001234, Excel made it 1234, naturally. Perfectly legitimate, but a dealbreaker for me. So between OpenOffice Calc and Excel I was finally able to upload the usernames and passwords via csv.

The majority have worked. With classes averaging 25 kids, only one or two have had trouble, and usually it is because somehow they mix up the numbers, or transpose a digit. Normal for this age. There’s grace for that…

So it began. Naturally, the first thing that the kids went for was the messaging function. I had included a Who’s Online block so they could see each other (and limited it to first names) and they began chatting and messaging within seconds of logging on. I suppose I should not be surprised that this is the biggest draw, after all, this is the new face of communication. I tried to lure them to the online quizzes, slide presentations, and integrated wiki. I lured a few, but not many. Ultimately, I had to instruct them to message AND online quiz, since they are such good multitaskers at home.

What I saw was surprising, rather than ask the person sitting next to them for help on a quiz question (and these are practice quizzes for the record), they asked the messaging recipient. Wouldn’t it seem quicker to ask next door? I was not fussing that they be quiet, rather I was enjoying the low buzz of learning! I wonder why they consistently preferred to ask a chat partner rather than a physical being in a close proximity…the most remarkable of all was that sometimes the messaging recipient WAS the person next to them!

I suppose this is a manifestation of the new face of learning? I wish I knew. All I know is, kids were engaged, they are working towards become self-sufficient and less teacher-dependant, and they are beginning to own the learning. Should I be concerned about the amount of messaging? The content of the messages? Still working that out in my head…

I guess I have to compare it to a class 1.0 setting. When I was a kid, to practice for a test we would complete a worksheet or three, and then maybe make flashcards with a partner. Can I say that my method worked better than the old school style? Well, kids walked out happy, and even in my most discipline-prone class, I had zero trouble.

I’ll chalk this up as a victory for new learning. Now it’s up to me to spend less time worrying about vocabulary and find a way to help them learn to teach themselves through some sort of fun inquiry model…

Maybe I should start a revolution in foreign language teaching…that would be fun…

2 Comments »

I recieved a comment to my posting about Loving Moodle so far from Jonathan Boutelle, CTO of Slideshare. He requested that I elaborate on how I was able to get Slideshare working with Moodle, since Moodle by default will not allow embed and object tags.

First let me say how excited I am that the CTO of Slideshare read my blog. I am a HUGE fan of Slideshare, even though I only recently learned of the service and began using it. Before Slideshare, I used to open my presentations that were initially created in MS PowerPoint in OpenOffice Impress. I would then use the Export as Movie command in OO, and that would create a .swf file that I could then post for students to view. I had to code my own embed tags and play around with sizes, etc. Slideshare has taken care of all of that for me. Thank you, Slideshare. Posting this entry is the least I can do.

So with no further adieu.

The first thing you must do to force Moodle to allow embed and object tags is remove the security barrier. When looged in as the administrator, click SECURITY –> SITE POLICIES and look for this checkbox.

So naturally one needs to check that checkbox. That is the easy first step. You have to be careful with this one, because now we are allowing anyone and everyone to utilize these tags. For my class, I don’t worry too much, but it can be a risk for other classes.

So what do we do? Media filter, of course!Click on MODULES –> FILTERS and look for MULTIMEDIA PLUGINS. If you enable it, you can decide what types of media files you will allow or disallow. This is an important plugin because a careful check reveals this box…

That is the key box to make sure you change. You can decide for yourself how you want the rest of the boxes to be, but this one (if you have this plugin enabled, mind you) can be the difference between Slideshare friendship and antagony.

So there you have it. Jonathan, I humbly submit this to fulfill your request!

3 Comments »

So I have had a few days with a fresh install of Moodle 1.7 Beta and so far it has been a fun ride. I have to admit that it was a little foolish of me to attempt to learn a new piece of software with a new and fairly buggy release (I downloaded it when it first came out on October 10 and installed after my last post, so it was a little stale) but nonetheless it has been good. I had a few errors and ultimately had to delete the entire install and start over, but it has been a fantastic learning experience. Here are some of the things that I like so far and how I have implemented outside tools.

First, here is a screenshot of what my front page looks like when you are logged in as my tester student. I want to also point out that the site is closed to the outside, but I will allow guest access to courses with a password. I think this is a great way to encourage parents to join in on the learning!

• Courses can be built around a social framework. Right in the center of my course page is a discussion forum. When I first began playing with Moodle I discarded the social framework calling it “too loose” and wanting more structure. The more I thought about the nature of learning these days I realized that learning is inherently social and that I needed to leverage that as opposed to run from it! So my courses, at least virtually, are built around a social framework.
• You can compose HTML pages directly from within Moodle and Moodle incorporates a WYSIWYG editor. Now, in order to embed some of the media that I wanted to use, I had to tell Moodle to allow me to do that, as by default Moodle can prevent users from using embed and object tags. I was ok with allowing this, and may explore a more secure way to do it, but for now it works fine. What I ended up doing was uploading all of my presentations to Slideshare, a new favorite website, and within minutes I had them all listed as resources. My entire nine weeks course is already there, I just have to unhide it after I present it in class.

• The quiz module works wonderfully. I have learned how to import questions from a text file using the Aiken format, which is essentially the easiest thing on the planet. As of yet I am only using multiple choice questions, but as our usage of Moodle increases (and so does my willingness to experiment) I will look towards matching and otherwise. These are not my favorite of questions, but considering I do teach a foreign language, there is a certain amount of vocabulary that kids need to review. This is a wonderful way to do it in a no-stress environment.

• I also like the fact that there is a chat feature and a wiki available. I think Moodle’s Wiki leaves a lot to be desired, so for now we will still use one of the external wiki services. I do know that they are looking to integrate a new, more feature-rich wiki sometime soon, and when that comes out I may consolidate a bit. I am becoming more and more of a fan of Wikispaces, although Wetpaint still has the hearts of some of my kids. I am going to begin a series of Wiki interviews to kick off my new blog, which will be announced shortly. I can’t wait to hear what some of these guys have to say about the Google acquisition of Jotspot. The Wiki market is heating up!

• I also love that Moodle has an internal blogging engine. As Elgg 0.7 comes out, I may consider integrating Elgg and Moodle for a more social platform, but I would have to see that in action first.

So that’s my Moodle wrapup! If you think there is a feature I am overlooking, or you want to check out my installation firsthand to see what it’s all about, let me know! I’ll gladly send you the guest access password, since there are no kids involved yet. That’s coming next week!

Update: Fixed font formatting issues. No content change

Update 2: Fixed broken links (sorry). No content change

2 Comments »